A Review of a Summer Game of Barrowmaze
The Good
The Barrows
The Barrows of Barrowmaze are a collection of 70 small mini dungeons scattered around the area of the megadungeon. Many are 1 room afairs and several are things like collapsed mounds or glorified entrances to the mega dungeon below. Many have creative little puzzles to solve or are just good little designs. Another thing I like is the Plundered/Sealed/Covered dichotomy of these barrows. Generally Plundered mounds have little treasure but are a simple walk in to enter, sealed have decent amounts of treasure but are sealed by some sort of doorway either a big metal door that needs to be picked to open or a stone one that needs to be broken down a noisy endeavor sure to cause random encounter rolls. Each is a simple impactful decision from the get go. Covered mounds take hours of work to uncover but are often the biggest and best designed minidungeons usually with the best loot. The thing my players learned to do is to take large parties to scare off small random encounters. This would have worked except for a later issue I will go into.
Dungeon Repopulation rules-
This is something sadly missing from most dungeons that get published. There is no clear rules of things likely moving into previously cleared rooms making large portions of many dungeons feeling "safe" after a while and parties just breezing through them. Barrowmaze however has clear rules for repopulating (1:6 chance per room explored in previous session) and a way to generate traps, monsters and treasure that may appear. In my game this led to a giant scorpion making its home in the main entrance to the megadungeon itself. An issue my players discussed how to end endlessly.
The Bad
Faction Play-
One of the greatest strengths of Old School Renaissance games is that faction play is so strong in many of its modules. In my experience of Barrowmaze there is little support of it, there is a lot of sameness to the factions (2 cults are the big ones), and they are extremely diluted by waves of undead and wildlife encounters that make their interactions with each other slim to none.
Outside of witnessing a single witnessed battle between the factions there was no sign of ability of players to interact with a faction play in the dungeon.
Monster Lists-
Many of the enemies in the Barrowmaze have specific stat blocks for them. Many think "oh cool 40 new monsters that is awesome!" except for most of these new monsters they would be better serviced by writing something in the room description such as "as skeleton but dripping limestone has made their AC as Plate" or "as Zombie but will reanimate if not killed with silver forcing all nearby to save vs fear or flee as if turned" instead of telling you to flip to another location in the book.
The sheer number of undead also leave a lot of encounters with 0 options outside slap fights or run which is pretty boring to me. The number of "2 zombies at 40 feet" kind of encounters I rolled was extremely boring and I started just describing things like that previously mention Giant Scorpion coming flying through and dragging off an undead as a snack. Just to keep the game running smoothly.
Gotchas
Barrowmaze is filled with all these little traps that are intentionally written to prevent the popular OSR behavior of telegraphing traps. They don't trigger from 10ft poles, they are "well hidden", etc etc. This has left PCs dying in pretty unpreventable ways that frankly border on "rocks fall you die" moments. In total my players lost 19 characters and only started reaching level 2 and 3 because I was extremely generous with xp.
I probably should have seen this coming because if you read the dungeon there are all these little snippets of what happened in Gary's home games and playtesting. They inevitably are always tales of how he "tricked" or "trapped" characters to their demise. They are not stories of how players overcame cool challenges. Gary seems to really fit the antagonistic GM archetype.
The Ugly
Greg Gillespie
Greg is a right wing reactionary with an unpleasant enough history that his being the author makes it more difficult to find players for this game in an online format. He advertises games as "devoid of woke nonsense." He also has a tendency to include more adult themes in his settings including using the notorious 1e "Harlot Encounter Table" for naming of taverns with names like "The Brazen Strumpet" which is problematic to a fair portion of the population.
Layout
I am grateful I did not decide to purchase the physical copies of Barrowmaze because they are so poorly laid out that I consistently found myself with 3 copies of the PDF open in order to be able to run anything without consistent flipping through to find various tables, rules, or stat blocks. Information is often also poorly presented in the rooms themselves. I found myself at times needing to reread a room as my players where exploring it and found I was missing a key detail in it if the players ended up outside the area I had made a point to pre-read in preparation of the session.
Conclusion
I found this module hard to run. The only reason I ran it was because it was one of those well reviewed OSR Megadungeons and I wanted something I could run for 3 months as a break after my last long term campaign finished. I would not recommend it to any GM that doesn't want to do a ton of homebrewing to flesh out the rest of the Duchy and the Moors. If you want to do a ton of homebrewing I would recommend just homebrewing everything. If you just want a ready made mega dungeon to plop into a homebrew campaign this can fill that roll at best.